The Social

(Credit: Paramount)

Please note: Friendly seas ahead! This is a spoiler-free review.

NEW YORK--When I walked into a theater at Viacom's midtown headquarters for an advance screening of the new J.J. Abrams-directed "Star Trek" prequel on Wednesday night, I felt like that kid who hadn't done her homework--for an entire semester.

And yet that was crucial to my assignment: to see if it was possible for someone completely new to the "Star Trek" universe to understand, process, and more importantly enjoy this new film.

Here's my background. I had never seen any of the prior "Star Trek" films or television series. I knew little more than the fact that it's all about a bunch of people flying a spaceship called the Enterprise, that Leonard Nimoy played an extraterrestrial named Spock who had funny ears and liked to say "Live long and prosper," and that the Klingon language has such a rabid following that the Bible has been translated into it.

Technically, the closest I'd come to seeing anything related to "Star Trek" was the 1998 parody "Galaxy Quest," in which the actors from a washed-up Trek-like TV show are enlisted by benevolent aliens who think they're the real thing (Little-known fact: That was the first movie role for Justin "I'm a Mac" Long). But I'm also a huge fan of Abrams' hit series "Lost," so I suppose I had a leg up there.

So here is my verdict: This movie is awesome.

The new "Star Trek" film is less an homage to a legendary science fiction franchise than to storytelling in general, back through decades of cinema and television and beyond. A deep respect for literature, pop culture, and epic storytelling is something that Abrams has proven time and again to fans, from the litany of film-rooted "Sawyer nicknames" on "Lost" to the tradition of Japanese monster movies that powered last year's "Cloverfield." This is a movie that will probably be well-regarded by anyone with an appreciation for epic adventure and drama, not to mention fast-paced and often witty dialogue.

And that's what the "Star Trek" prequel needed, considering the hand-wringing that surrounded it from even before it was officially greenlit.

Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman was on hand before the screening to greet the audience and explain a bit about the film's origins: that Paramount, the Viacom-owned studio that is releasing the new film, was well aware of the complications and potential pratfalls of adapting "Star Trek, especially in a prequel form, and especially with the goal of reaching out to both "Trekkies" (or "Trekkers," as I hear there is a difference?) and potential new fans. He said that cinema luminaries, including Steven Spielberg, had warned Abrams that undertaking a project with such a history and legacy of loyal fans could be risky.

But the director went ahead, a second Abrams-helmed "Star Trek" picture was greenlit almost immediately, and his contract with Paramount was extended another five years. Obviously, this is a franchise in which the studio has some real faith.

Pretty early on, you can tell that this isn't the "Star Trek" of the '60s, even though I admittedly don't really know what that is. The first 20 minutes contain not only ear-splitting action sequences, but brand-drops of both Nokia and Budweiser (as well as 'Slusho,' a fictional brand from "Cloverfield"), one very Abrams-esque "gotcha" character reveal that will take most newbies like me by surprise, and the oddly effective use of the Beastie Boys' 1994 song "Sabotage."

There is a pivotal bar fight, which I first took as a nod to "Star Wars," but on second thought, the cinematic barroom confrontation really goes back much further than the Mos Eisley Cantina. (I need to brush up on my knowledge of Westerns.) Again, this is a movie deeply rooted in generations of storytelling both onscreen and off.

I can see why some hardcore "Star Trek" fans may have been nervous about the casting decisions: the Internet Movie Database informs me that Chris Pine, the young actor cast as Captain Kirk, was starring opposite Lindsay Lohan in some tepid romantic comedy a few years ago, and Sulu is played by John Cho, best known for playing Harold in the spliffed-up "Harold and Kumar" movies. I must say that Cho wields a retractable sword just as well as he does a joint, and Pine's Kirk keeps the frat-boy attitude to a relative minimum.

But more importantly, "Star Trek" is just plain fun. And I came to appreciate the fact that I was sitting in that theater without prejudice. I was concerned less about whether the cast would live up to the actors who originated their roles, and more about holy whoa, that spaceship just blew up!. There is, however, a flip side to the universality of the new "Star Trek" that Paramount might not love: The fact that it stands so well on its own might mean that it doesn't mint a new generation of Trekkies.

Like me, for one. As much as I enjoyed the prequel, I can't see myself Netflixing all the DVDs of the past "Star Trek" TV series and movies. I've already got "Lost" to deal with, and one fictional universe and canon is enough for me, thank you very much. Seriously--what does lie in the shadow of the statue? Losties, can you help me out here?

Viacom's MTV Networks has brought some of its television content to Netflix's library of streaming online video, the companies announced Monday.

Yaaaaaaay! SpongeBob is taking over your Netflix account!

(Credit: Nickelodeon)

The offering consists primarily of kids' shows from the Nickelodeon network, with select seasons from the shows "iCarly," "Blue's Clues," "Dora the Explorer," "SpongeBob SquarePants," and a handful of others, as well as the first nine seasons of "South Park," the Comedy Central animated series that you probably don't want your kids watching.

Netflix's streaming-video service still very much takes the back burner to its DVDs-by-mail service, but the company has deals in place with TiVo, Boxee, Microsoft's Xbox, and some HDTV providers.

It's also the second streaming Netflix deal for Viacom, which licensed content from its Logo network last year. Viacom has also signed content deals with Joost (Disclosure: CNET News publisher CBS is an investor in Joost) and NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture Hulu, which now runs episodes of Comedy Central's hit talk shows "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report."

One major player in the video world with which you probably won't see MTV Networks making a deal any time soon: YouTube. Viacom still has an outstanding lawsuit against YouTube parent company Google over infringing content.

So either Jon Stewart is really on to something with his mad-as-hell crusade against financial hypocrisy and stupidity, or there are a lot of unemployed people watching Comedy Central clips to pass the time.

Either way, an on-air freakout by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli may have been one of the best things to happen to Comedy Central in months: Fake-news pundits Stewart (of "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart") and Stephen Colbert (of "The Colbert Report") have seen traffic to their Web sites and online video clips soar after the two went on mocking vendettas against Santelli, fellow CNBC personality Jim Cramer, and the NBC Universal-owned business network in general.

Traffic to the shows' Web sites has been at its highest of the year so far in the past week, at over 60 percent their weekly average for 2009. ComedyCentral.com, which hosts video clips of both programs, also had its best traffic of the year, and the digital version of a viciously funny clip called "CNBC Gives Financial Advice" logged over 1.3 million views in a week, the sort of numbers usually reserved for grainy videos of cats behaving unnaturally.

Here's the back story: Santelli was supposed to appear on "The Daily Show" after his tirade about the federal government's economic bailout, but backed out abruptly. That's when Stewart and Colbert--but especially Stewart--turned up the heat. Stewart went on the aforementioned anti-CNBC rant on March 5, putting "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer squarely in his crosshairs. Cramer appeared on "The Colbert Report" the following night.

Now, Cramer is scheduled to make a "Daily Show" appearance on Thursday night.

Stewart and Colbert have been two of the most visible figures in cable television's slow crawl onto the Web. Not only are they wildly popular with young and tech-savvy audiences, but the segmented format of their talk shows lends itself well to being split into short clips and swapped via video-sharing sites, which meant that unauthorized clips of the two were some of YouTube's earliest hits. That's what indirectly led to Comedy Central parent company Viacom's massive copyright lawsuit against YouTube owner Google.

Later on, the full archives of both shows were made available on Comedy Central's Web site, and recent episodes are available in full on Hulu (as well as iTunes and Xbox Live).

Colbert, who started out as a commentator on "The Daily Show" before spinning off his blowhard persona into his own talk show, also owes a big chunk of his notoriety to the Web. Video of C-SPAN's coverage of the White House Press Correspondents' dinner three years ago, in which Colbert performed a shockingly blunt comedy routine that skewered then-President George W. Bush, was a huge hit on the Web among those who wouldn't have considered actually watching C-SPAN in the first place.

Last year, Colbert was honored by the annual Webby Awards as "Person of the Year." Take that, nonbelievers!

Update at 7:59 a.m. PST: A RealNetworks representative quashes a rumor about a RealNetworks-MTV joint venture.

The long-expected layoffs at Viacom, parent company of MTV Networks, have finally taken place.

According to an internal memo (first leaked to gossip blog Gawker), 850 positions have been cut. That amounts to 7 percent of the company's workforce.

"Our advantages and best efforts can't completely protect Viacom from the very serious and broad-based challenges of this economic recession," CEO Philippe Dauman wrote in the e-mail. "Viacom's long-term health will depend on our shared commitment to adapt, to innovate and to make difficult choices. To compete and thrive, we need to create an organization and a cost structure that are in step with the evolving economic environment."

A press release Thursday from Viacom gave a more detailed explanation: "The restructuring and write-down together will result in a pre-tax charge of $400 million to $450 million, or $0.42 to $0.48 per diluted share, in the fourth quarter of 2008. These staffing and compensation actions and write-downs are expected to result in pre-tax savings of $200 million to $250 million in 2009."

It's been common knowledge that Viacom layoffs were on the way, and the company had already canceled its big holiday parties this year, giving employees two extra vacation days in exchange.

In addition to MTV, Viacom owns BET Networks and Paramount Pictures. Its cable channels include Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, VH1, and Noggin.

According to a separate post on Gawker, the New York office for MTV-RealNetworks joint venture Rhapsody America is rumored to have closed, leaving 25 people jobless. RealNetworks spokesman Ryan Luckin said in an e-mail to me on Thursday that the rumor is false.

These days, everyone can use a few good laughs. Guess that means Comedy Central's latest launch is well-timed.

The Viacom-owned cable network took Jokes.com, a property it acquired in 2002, and relaunched it Wednesday as a hub for its stand-up comedy archives. Sort of like a Hulu for stand-up comedy, it's debuting with over 5,000 video clips (embeddable and shareable, naturally) and 12,000 text-based jokes that are searchable by topic ("George W. Bush" or "holidays") and by comedian. A "Comedians A-Z" database provides information on different stand-up comics and who's on tour--the site sells tickets and merchandise, too.

"Stand-up comedy and comedians have always been the backbone of the network," said Erik Flannigan, executive vice president of digital media at MTV Networks Entertainment Group, the Viacom division that encompasses Comedy Central.

As with other Comedy Central video sites, like The Daily Show and Colbert Nation, the content is ad-supported. This summer, Comedy Central took another acquired property, Atom.com, and turned it into a site for short-form Web comedy.

Since the clips in the video archive are sourced from Comedy Central programming going back to 1997's The A-List, none of them go beyond a late-night-cable level of tawdriness. The text jokes, Flannigan said, can be dirtier.

"We're not trying to make it as dirty as humanly possible, but we're not adhering to the same standards as broadcast," he explained.

But Jokes.com, which was put together over the course of about a year by a team of about 20 people, will likely expand beyond television content soon. Flannigan said the company has "explored the notion" of adding stand-up comedy from other Viacom properties like MTV and BET. Comedy Central representatives continue to plan to grow the site, introducing the ability for users to upload their own stand-up videos and add more social-networking features for comedians to network with fans. Members of the team hinted that they speak on a frequent basis with News Corp.'s MySpace to discuss possible cross-promotion and campaigns for discovering young comedians.

There's also a "joke-a-day" iPhone app coming in 2009. Better warn your boss about the impending plunge in productivity.

A new kind of video advertising is coming to MySpace.

The company has partnered with a video advertising company, Auditude, and Viacom's MTV Networks division, to bring Auditude's video ads to MTV content on the News Corp.-owned social network's MySpaceTV video hub.

Here's how Auditude works: it can detect MTV Networks content if either MTVN itself or a MySpace user uploads it, and then it implements both targeted ads and "attribution ads," which provide data about the source of the programming. (For example: an "attribution ad" for Comedy Central talk show The Colbert Report could include information about when the program is broadcast on-air.)

Right now, according to a joint release, Auditude already has four years' worth of 100 television channels indexed in its database, plus 250 million standalone videos.

"As one of the leading providers of online video in the world, we give our fans the power not only to consume our content, but also to share and interact with it across the Web," Mika Salmi, president of global digital media at MTV Networks, said in a release. "With Auditude's solution, we can continue to give users the freedom to take our content wherever they go online, while ensuring that we can monetize it as well."

This is a bit of a surprise coming from Viacom, which sued Google's YouTube over the distribution of pirated content. MySpace has reason to feel jilted by YouTube, too--it's no secret that News Corp. had been interested in acquiring YouTube, which can credit a big part of its rise to embedded videos on MySpace profiles, before Google outbid it.

Auditude says that its technology is compatible with YouTube, as well as Veoh, AOL Video, Dailymotion, and others.

But despite Viacom's beef with YouTube, content from MTV Networks can be viewed on a number of partner sites, like Imeem and Veoh, and episodes of Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report are available on Hulu, the joint video venture between NBC Universal and News Corp.

MTV Networks also recently launched MTVMusic.com, a compendium of the longstanding pop-culture brand's music videos.

It seems like the only complaint that the cranky digital-media press can come up with for MTVMusic.com, the legendary pop-culture brand's new music video hub, is, "Why wasn't this here years ago?"

Yeah, yeah, we know. There are licensing issues, especially for all those campy '80s videos that haven't seen the light of day in years. And launching a product prematurely could have led to bad press, as opposed to the "wow, we like this" response that MTV Music seems to have gotten thus far.

The issue, of course, is that most music videos are already available on YouTube, and it's not clear yet whether people will change their browsing habits and actually go over to MTV Music for videos now.

Viacom-owned MTV Networks has built in community features through its Flux technology, so that members can comment on videos, rate them (not surprisingly, Rick Astley's 1988 song "Never Gonna Give You Up," which has experienced a wild surge of Internet-meme popularity in the past year, is near the top of the chart), and share them on Facebook, MySpace, and blogs.

There are a couple of ads for Rhapsody, MTV's music retail partner, but I haven't seen any actual "Buy This Song" links accompanying videos. That'd be a good move for MTV.

So I leave you with Weezer's "Buddy Holly," one of my favorite videos of the '90s, back when we all thought they'd turn out to be a dweeby, one-hit-wonder novelty act:

(Credit: MTV)

Once the global leader in youth culture, MTV's attempts to address the social-networking craze have seemed a little puzzling sometimes (the Twittering Moon Man?) But now we've seen another piece of the entertainment brand's puzzle: Backchannel, a play-while-you watch game that's one part chat room, one part Digg, and one part Mystery Science Theater with a Mean Girls twist.

It's debuting on Monday night with that evening's episode of wildly popular reality-soap The Hills.

Here's how Backchannel works: Watch the show (for now, only The Hills is on Backchannel, but later this fall it will be accompanying the network's new reality show about Paris Hilton picking a new best friend), join a "room" of other viewers while you're watching, and offer snarky or insightful one-liners that appear on the screen in a sort of tag cloud. Click on the ones you like, and they'll accumulate points. You'll receive points from the votes on your own one-liners, as well as submissions you voted on that became especially popular. And, yes, it extends through commercials, too.

In a press conference Wednesday, MTV's digital team referred to Backchannel, developed by New York-based gaming firm Area/Code, as "competitive chat." When you think about it, it's a little bit like competitive Twittering.

Executives said the formation of the game was heavily influenced by MTV's video game Rock Band, which added a new dimension to many bands and artists that were well over 20 years past their heyday.

"Something that arguably has diminishing value over time actually becomes more valuable over time," Area/Code's Kevin Slavin explained. "If Rock Band is doing that for music, what can do that for television?"

But Backchannel has bigger implications for what MTV has in store when it comes to social networking. Profiles for Backchannel are compatible with Flux, the from its acquisition of start-up Tagworld and debuted last year. Popular comments from Backchannel, aggregated on the Web site, will also be displayed on reruns of the show, much like MTV's sister channel VH1's Pop Up Video show from the 1990s.

Additionally, while current incentives for playing are limited to street cred and "badges" on your profile, MTV may be stepping this up a notch. Executives hinted during the press conference that down the road, accumulated gaming points may become a virtual currency that can be exchanged for real prizes--memorabilia, products featured on the show, or whatever.

Something like Backchannel clearly isn't applicable to shows with a "deep" fandom like Lost or Heroes, but I'll admit it--it's perfect for trashing Heidi's plastic surgery, Whitney's weird outfits, and Audrina's perpetually unsound grammar. Brush up on your "OMG" and "fugly," and get ready to unleash your inner Perez Hilton.

MTV might've strayed away from music these days--My Super Sweet Sixteen, anyone?--but the entertainment mainstay's latest project aims to both bring it back to its roots and propel it into the social Web. Ambitious, yes.

'The Hills': Now telling you what you want to listen to.

(Credit: MTV)

It's called "Soundtrack," and it's an "interactive music guide for TV." If you're watching a heated moment of cattiness between Lauren and Audrina on The Hills and are dying to know what song's playing in the background, you can log on and find out exactly what it was. Then you can purchase the MP3, thanks to MTV's partnership with music service Rhapsody, as well as look up more soundtrack information from past programming. You can, of course, network with other members--this is powered by Flux, the social-networking technology that MTV Networks parent company Viacom built when it acquired a start-up called Tagworld.

Radio stations have been doing the "look up a song" gimmick for years, which makes it not particularly jaw-dropping for MTV to institute the same thing. But it does tap into a host of extremely popular and influential cable shows (for better or for worse) and cross-promotion on TV will likely boost traffic. Plus, it should be said that television soundtracks have become a crucial spot for music discovery--remember when The O.C. propelled California indie-pop bands to the heights of coolness a few years ago?

But MTV also hopes that Soundtrack, which will be worked into the main MTV.com site soon, will become an important promotional hub. There's a ranking of the top songs and artists--and it's a lot more obscure than iTunes or MTV's own TRL charts--and indie bands can create profiles to amass fans.

The indie band promotion may remind you a bit of PureVolume, which thrived for a while as a music promotion and discovery site before MySpace and an army of popular music blogs far surpassed it in influence. And MTV, too, has heretofore been a series of misses in the Web 2.0 space: Viacom lost out to News Corp. in the bidding for MySpace, which had fast become the Web's center for finding new music. The company also failed to jump on the music blog trend, which start-up Buzznet has quickly been amassing. The Twittering Moon Man didn't do much either.

Soundtrack, however, is MTV's most targeted and relevant Web 2.0 effort yet, and will likely be an appreciated attempt to bring at least some of the network's focus back to music. Considering how many people watch The Hills, it could make a difference.

Let's also hope MTV somehow ties Soundtrack into its most shining success of the digital age: video game Rock Band.